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HANDICAPPED 


H. M. BURR 


LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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Copyright If 


COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 




HANDICAPPED 


BY 

H. M. BURR 

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Seminar Publishing Co. 

SPRINGFIELD, MASS. 



Copyright, 1912, 
by 

The Seminar Publishing Company. 


# • 3 S’ 

& Cl. A 3 1 2 6 7 3 

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Handicapped. 

By H. M. Burr. 

Part I 

The Metropolitan Opera House was emptying itself 
upon the midnight street. The crowd pouring out of the 
entrance rapidly divided into streams and brooks and 
rivulets of people. Some walked hurriedly away, anxious 
to save a nickel, to make up in their minds at least for 
an unusual extravagance; others struggled for the street 
cars, desirous of getting as much rest as possible before 
the morrow’s work; others leisurely waited for their 
carriages and automobiles to be called off, some of them 
conscious that they were the envy of many a walker and 
car rider, and that their equipages were the substantial 
evidences of their having arrived at a certain coveted 
stage in the race for wealth and place. 

Drifting out with the streams of carriage aristocracy 
come a man and woman, who to the discriminating eye 
are worth a second glance. The man, somewhat above 
the average height, broad-browed, keen-eyed, clean-cut 
in face and figure, was obviously a thorobred — one who 
wins with flying colors or drops in the harness. A subtle 
air of success about him showed that hitherto he had been 
a winner in most of life’s races. Every movement showed 
the easy poise of a man long familiar with the refine- 
ments and luxuries of life, and at the same time there 
were lines in the face and a set of the jaw which sug- 
gested that wealth and social position had been won and 


3 


not inherited, and that in the most strenuous battlefield 
in the world. 

Tho he was unmistakably a young man, the silvered 
temples showed that his years had been long in intensity. 
His eyes tho quiet and steady had that look which always 
indicates that the human engine is being run at high 
pressure. 

The young woman who walked by his side as he led 
the way to their carriage was of a type clearly ordained 
by nature to be the mate of such a man, tho she evidently 
was not such as yet. The critical observer would have 
noticed an indefinable harmony which seemed to include 
every detail of expression, dress and bearing — a harmony 
so perfect as to deceive the careless observer into think- 
ing that she was almost commonplace. She had those 
characteristics of face and figure which are only remark- 
able in combination and are the despair of the novelist 
and the artist. To say that she was of medium height, 
with brown hair and hazel eyes, that her dress was the 
work of a New York tailor, that her bearing was quiet 
and dignified, with something that suggested both char- 
acter and capacity, would be to give a description which 
would apply to a large number of fine American girls. 
Yet to those who loved her, Margaret Maybourne was 
anything but commonplace. Beneath the surface of good 
breeding and general fine feeling there lay mines of 
undeveloped wealth that only waited for the man and the 
occasion. 

As the cab hurried them along to Margaret’s home, the 
two talked together with the freedom of old acquaint- 
ances, and yet with certain restraint which suggested that 


4 


an old friendship was ready to blossom into a deeper and 
more intimate relation. But both recognized the fact 
that to hurry the process would be to rob the flower of 
their courtship of something of its beauty and fragrance. 
And yet as Rodney Levasseur watched the tender glow 
in the eyes of the girl, it seemed to him that the time of 
waiting must end. Why should he wait longer? True, 
Margaret was the only daughter of a railroad magnate, 
David Maybourne, heiress to no one knew how many 
stocks and bonds, sought after by many men of wealth 
and station, but he had no false modesty and knew that 
his blood was as good as theirs, his manners as 
polished, and over against their wealth he could place an 
unusual measure of success in his chosen profession, for 
altho still a young man, he was recognized as one of the 
best surgeons in the great metropolis. David Maybourne 
had already decided that the rising young surgeon was 
most to his liking of Margaret’s suitors. And Margaret? 
While Rodney was not sure, he could not but hope. Why 
wait longer? His heart cried out for expression. It even 
seemed as tho her attitude was one of tremulous expecta- 
tion, but still his lips refused to voice the cry of his heart. 
It was as tho some iron hand held back every word of 
love at mouth gate, as quaint old John Bunyan would have 
said. Margaret, with a loving woman’s swift intuition, 
sensed the strange conflict and constraint and glanced 
anxiously at him. She could not easily meet the hungry 
appeal of his eyes. His lips talked on with mechanical 
ease of purely impersonal matters, but his face gave evi- 
dence of the inner conflict. There were lines in it which 
she had never seen before and it seemed strangely white 


5 


in the pale electric light. She had an anxious question 
on her lips, when the cab rattled up to the curb before 
her home. 

Rodney helped her to alight and escorted her up the 
granite steps. It was too late to ask him in, but again 
she turned to question him, only to be checked by some- 
thing in his manner which made it impossible. The good- 
night greeting was pleasantly formal, but the fire in his 
eyes burned even more brightly. It seemed to Margaret 
as if he could not go without speaking, but he did. She 
turned as she closed the street door, looking thru the plate 
glass panels to see him depart, perhaps hoping, who 
knows, for a last message that the eyes could speak if 
the lips would not. 

To her surprise he had not yet reached his carriage, 
he who was usually so quick and light of foot. He was 
walking slowly down the steps with his hand on the 
brass railing, like an old man who has learned not to 
trust his legs without other support. When he reached 
the sidewalk he crossed to his carriage steadily but with 
strangely lingering footsteps. A sudden terror gripped 
her and she cried out, “Rodney ! Rodney !” forgetting the 
heavy closed door. Tho he did not hear her cry, some 
appeal from her soul to his reached him. He turned and 
looked at her, his white face framed in the window of 
the cab, and his eyes ? — did she see by love's clairvoyance 
their strange look of love and longing, mingled with pain, 
or was it her imagination ? 

Margaret went to her room with hesitating footsteps, 
saying to herself, “He loves me; his eyes told me that," 
and then with a dull pain, “Why did he not speak? And 


if he were ill, why did he not tell me — if he loved me?” 

A few moments later the doctor’s cab drew up before 
a handsome apartment house, where under a window 
was the polished brass announcement of his profession, 


Rodney Levasseur 
Physician and Surgeon 

yano, opened the door for him and followed him to his 
inner office, for no matter how late Rodney was out, 
Koyano was always waiting for him. As always, he 

He stepped out of his cab and walked up the steps and 
to his rooms with the same dull deliberateness with which 
he had left Margaret’s house. His Japanese man, Ko- 
found his easy chair drawn up by the light, his smoking 
jacket thrown over its back, his favorite cigars and the 
latest magazines within reach. Everything was in its 
usual place, but tonight he seemed to see it all as in a 
dream. Without changing his coat he sank into the 
chair, forgetting even to remove his hat till the little 
brown man, hovering about him, reminded him of it. 

Finally he seemed to rouse himself as if from a trance 
and turning to Koyano, said : “Bring me that large book 
from the bottom shelf, the third from the end; breakfast 
at nine; cut out the telephone — I will answer no calls 
tonight.” 

After Koyano had gone he turned to the book — “Dis- 
orders of the Nervous System,” Colrain. He turned over 
the pages till he found a chapter headed “Paresis,” and 
then to a paragraph with “Cerebro Spinal” in stout black 


7 


letters in its beginning. He had often seen them before, 
but tonight they looked as black as the wolves of Cerberus. 
Slowly he read, following the lead of his finger as he 
had done when a child. He read it thru till the last word 
and then the pilot finger stopped .... and a dark- 
ness — a darkness that could be felt settled down upon his 
spirit. The relentless clock counted off the passing 
hours and moments, but the finger still rested on the 
page of the ponderous leather-covered book. Were it 
not for the eyes one might have thot him dead — he 
was so still and motionless. These seemed turned to look 
within, witnessing some Waterloo of the spirit. Thus 
the gray morning light found him as it struggled thru 
the smoky haze of the metropolis. 

It roused him from his long conflict. He slowly shut 
the book and laid it upon the table and then bent for- 
ward as if to rise, but his limbs refused his bidding and 
he sank back into his chair with a groan. He was para- 
lyzed. The brain could not as yet forget its habit of 
command and he tried again to rise, but in vain. 

Tho Rodney had been brought up in a Christian home 
and was a member of the old home church, religious 
observances had been dropped one by one out of his 
life. First, the Bible had been shelved, then church- 
going had been crowded out, and last of all, the habit 
of prayer and any conscious recognition of God. If he 
had been asked what his religion was, he probably would 
have answered, “To do my work as well as I can.” But 
now at this supreme crisis of his life, going back to the 
habit of his boyhood, he cried out, “God! God! God!”, 
like a child in the dark crying for his mother. 


8 


I like to think that it was in answer to this cry of a 
despairing soul that the man’s spirit roused itself to a 
struggle for self-mastery. The look of agonized terror 
left his face by degrees and was replaced by a look such 
as one sometimes sees on the faces of the mortally 
wounded, who still can fire another round or make a 
final charge. 

When Koyano came in with his breakfast he found the 
doctor sitting in the chair as he had left him and his 
eyes, made keen by affection for “his doctor,” read almost 
in a glance that something was wrong, tho his Oriental 
calm did not leave him, and he only said, “Ah — it is bad, 
the doctor is sick.” “Yes,” said Rodney, in a far-off 
voice very unlike his own, “I am knocked out” — and as 
if the words were dragged from him, “Can’t move my 
legs. Telephone Dr. Colrain and ask him to call on Dr. 
Levasseur at his earliest convenience.” 

No mother could have been more tender and deft than 
was Koyano as he ministered to the helpless man, “with 
the tenderness of a woman and the strength of a man,” 
as Rodney said of him long afterwards. 

Dr. Colrain, the famous specialist in nerve diseases, 
came with a swiftness that told much of his affection 
for his pupil and friend. His hair was snow white, and 
his face furrowed with lines of thot and effort, but the 
dome-like forehead was as smooth as marble, and his 
skin had the warm glow which comes from strongly puls- 
ing blood and the vitality which the great workers of the 
world have. He entered Rodney’s office with a genial 
greeting, “Well, my boy, what’s up?” But a glance 
showed him that this was no commonplace indisposition, 


and the friend was merged at once into the physician and 
man of science. In a quiet and almost cold-blooded way, 
as it might have seemed to an outsider, he went over the 
case point by point, once, twice, thrice. Then he walked 
to the window and stood looking silently out. As Rod- 
ney watched him, he saw the hand that played with the 
curtain tremble a little and then grip the cord till the 
tendons on the back of his hand showed white. For a 
moment Rodney forgot himself in the pain of his friend. 
He knew that the old doctor was fond of him, but he had 
not imagined that he would care like this. 

At last Dr. Colrain turned from the window and said 
abruptly, as is the manner of men under the stress of 
great feeling, “Rod, I wish it had been the old dog and 
not the young — I will be in again,” and hurried away. 
There was no need of formal diagnosis. 

After his friend had gone, Rodney read sentence upon 
himself as if he had been the physician instead of the 
patient. “Cerebro-spinal paresis — caused by prolonged 
nervous strain. Cure? None! Treatment? Imma- 
terial! Length of life? May live to a good old age — 
tho unlikely.” He laughed aloud with a hoarse laugh 
that would have been more heartbreaking than sobs to 
one who loved him. 

To his surprise the voiceless anguish of the night grad- 
ually passed. He felt as if in a kind of stupor and seemed 
to think of himself no longer in the first person, but his 
mind worked with unusual clearness and he began to 
plan for the future. With the instinct which men often 
share with sick and wounded animals, he longed to 
crawl away and hide from all those whom he had known 


10 


in the days of his strength. And Margaret ? At the thot 
of her a red wave of agony submerged him, but it was 
only for a moment, and then his thots went on in the 
same impersonal way. To slip away and hide; to be 
forgotten; that was the thing, but how, where, when? 
As he sat brooding with closed eyes there suddenly rose 
before him the picture of a camp in the woods in North- 
western Canada, where he had spent many a summer 
vacation. He was on the rough porch of his log cabin; 
beneath him lay the river. In the stillness he could hear 
the rush of its waters. To the east lay the blue lake, 
glistening in the glow of the setting sun, reflected from 
the wings of cloud birds which hovered over it. To the 
west the forest of fern and pine stretched away for 
leagues till it lost itself in the slopes of the Rockies, 
whose snowcaps were now studded with gems and 
sheathed in gold like a bishop’s mitre. The breath of 
the fern and the balsam seemed to fill his nostrils; the 
thousand voices of the forest seemed to call to him, 
“Come! Come! Come!” 

He opened his eyes with a start. Yes, he would go at 
once, as swiftly as the twin magicians, steam and steel, 
would bear him. All the energy of his nature seemed to 
concentrate in the passion to get away. The crippled 
body seemed to have centered all its vigor in the brain. 
He called Koyano and gave directions for packing, for 
purchase of tickets and for a hundred and one details of 
preparation which would have hopelessly befuddled the 
ordinary valet, but Koyano had the genius for manage- 
ment illustrated so wonderfully in the Russo-Japanese 
War. He went about his task with the skill of a com- 


11 


missary-general. From New York to the far-off wil- 
derness everything would happen as “prearranged.” 

After Koyano had gone out, Rodney drew his writ- 
ing materials toward him and wrote three letters. The 

first was directed, Mr. James Joy, Camp Aloha, , 

Canada, and read as follows: 

New York, June — 

Dear Jim : 

I have been caught. Coming back to you and the trees. Reach 
camp by boat July 3. 

As ever your friend, 

“Doc." 

The second letter was to a doctor who had been a class- 
mate in a medical school, a fine fellow who had brains 
and ability, but had somehow or other not “struck it 
rich” as yet, located in a poor office with an uncertain 
practice on the lower West Side. 


Richard Comeyn, M. D. 

My dear Dick: 

Knocked up and must take a long rest. Am answering “the 
call of the wild." Want a good man to take my office and prac- 
tice for an indefinite period. The rent is paid for a year in 
advance. I am sure you will do it for old times’ sake. I leave 
a list of patients who are on the free list. You will look out for 
them I am sure. 


Good luck, old man, 


Rod. 


The third letter was directed to Miss Margaret May- 
bourne and read as follows: 

My dear Margaret: 

Last night I had it in my heart to ask you a question, but 
something shut the doors of my lips. Perhaps it was Providence, 


12 


or God, or some approaching intuition of disaster. If I, and if 
you — but I must not think of that, how terrible it would have 
been ! But I am man enough to be thankful that I did not speak, 
that is, if you really cared. If I were more of a man, I would 
pray that you had not learned to care.. 

Now I am like a dead man, writing from the other side. 

May God give you all the things that I once hoped I might 
give you while I was a man atnong men. 

I have gone — do not ask where — to be forgotten, and looking 
for forgetfulness, tho even now something tells me I shall not 
find it 

But the letter was not mailed. Instead he tore it into 
a hundred fragments which he tossed into the waste 
basket, not noticing that Koyano, who had returned, had 
been watching him intently with those inscrutable Orien- 
tal eyes. 

Again he wrote, this time swiftly and nervously, not 
once stopping, as if he feared that his resolution would 
fail him if he paused for an instant. 

My dear Miss Maybourne: 

I have been called away from the city on important business. 
I shall be gone for an indefinite period. I shall miss many things, 
but none more than being one of your train of admiring friends. 
Dr. Comeyn will occupy my office. 

May you be as happy as you deserve to be. 

Your friend, 

Rodney Levasseur. 


13 


Part II. 


A group of lumbermen, trappers, prospectors and 
guides were loafing about the combined store and post- 
office of a frontier village in the wilds of Canada. No 
railroad had as yet attacked the region. Twice a week 
during the open season, a wheezy old steamer made the 
trip up the lake and to the headwaters of navigation 
on the river. It was Wednesday night and the mail had 
just come in. Few of the men that lingered while it 
was being sorted had any justifiable expectation of get- 
ting letters, but there was still an air of expectancy as 
they heard the names of the fortunate ones called off, 
as was the custom of the place. 

At the back of the group stood a tall man with the 
rawhide leanness of the frontier, whose face was as 
grave as that of a New England deacon, but in whose 
deep-set eyes there twinkled an unquenchable spirit of 
humor. His tongue was evidently “hung in the middle,” 
for there flowed from his lips an unbroken stream of 
talk, mingling satire and horseplay with quaint bits of 
rustic philosophy. He was clearly the town wag and 
also the town philosopher upon whom the simple men 
of the camp and woods depended for amusement, and 
without knowing it, for homespun wisdom and morality. 

Tonight, as usual, he was holding forth, subjecting 
each man who went to the little window for his mail to 
a running fire of comment: “Step right along, Bill. She 
ain’t goin’ to write agin ’ntil you do. It’s only a circiler 


14 


for hair restorer.” But by this time Bill had drawn 
back, shamefacedly rubbing his bald pate. “Move up, Sam, 
and git yer monthly dividend from the Pole Cat Mine.” 
Sam turned an honest penny by trapping the cat with the 
short legs and long smell. So it went on till the voice 
of the postman called out with an air of evident sur- 
prise, “Jim Joy, letter,” adjusting his spectacles, “from 
New York.” The tide of caustic comment from the back 
row suddenly ceased and the astonished orator lurched 
up to the little window, dumb for once in his life, for 
Jim had not had a letter since the last summer that “Doc” 
had come to camp. Everyone waited in eager suspense, 
feeling that a letter for Jim was a town matter. 

As Jim opened the letter with clumsy fingers, his 
watchers saw that they trembled, and were startled, for 
they knew that if that same hand were holding a rifle 
upon a grizzly or a paddle in the most dangerous of 
rapids, it would have been “as steady as a church.” 

Jim read his letter slowly and with great difficulty, 
tho the writing was as plain as typewriting, and then 
repeated, half under his breath, but in a tone easily 
heard by every eager listener, “ ‘Doc’ has been ketched, 
‘Doc’ has been ketched,” and then dashing the letter at 
his feet shouted in a voice that he only used in some 
crisis of a great log jam, “Hell! boys, the doctor has been 
ketched.” 

To these men of the woods it could only mean one 
thing. If, when cutting trees in the woods, a man was 
caught beneath a trunk or branch by some mischance, 
and his back or leg broken, the men simply said, “He 
was ketched.” It always meant one man less in camp, 


15 


and often a rude pine box made from rough unplaned 
boards and a prayer by the cure , and then a white wooden 
cross. That a “pill mixer/' as they had playfully called 
the doctor, should be “ketched” in a great city was no 
cause for question. To these men the whole world was 
filled with trees, trees, trees, from the sunrise to the sun- 
set, with now and then a patch of water or prairie or 
clearing. 

No one spoke for a little. The doctor had been a great 
favorite among the men. Many an old wound or myste- 
rious ailment had yielded to his subtle magic. To them 
all, as to the Indian, Walking Horse, he was “heap big 
medicine." But a sudden change passed over Jim's face 
and the surprised pain and dismay gave way to a tender 
look of solicitude that his fellows had never seen before, 
and he stooped down and picked up the letter and read 
it again. “Boys," said he in a voice which trembled a 
little, “he is coming back to the woods by the next boat. 
How many of you fellers will help put his cabin to rights 
tomorrer?" He did not wait for an answer, knowing 
that there would be more men at the cabin the next day 
than he could use, but pulling his hat over his eyes he 
walked out into the night, to mourn over his friend and 
at the same time with a glow at his heart because “Doc" 
was coming back to him. 

The next day a score of men made the camp ship- 
shape with affectionate zeal, doing a hundred things 
which no one would have thought necessary for himself. 
New slabs were put on uncertain places in the roof and 
stones replaced in the chimney. Fresh balsam boughs 
were cut and so laid that they would make a couch soft 


16 


\ 


enough for a king, and redolent with the most wholesome 
fragrance in the world. A new wooden hinge was made 
for the door. The spring behind the cabin which bubbled 
up thru the hollow trunk of an ancient tree was cleaned. 
A small boy even remembered to catch a trout from a 
nearby brook and put it in the spring because he remem- 
bered that the doctor liked to have one there. At last 
a broader path with an easier ascent was made from 
the lumber camp to the cabin. 

On Saturday afternoon when the boat was due all the 
men who could get away were at the rude log dock 
watching for her coming. By common consent, Jim Joy 
was given the post of honor, a great pile that gave the 
watcher some ten feet of advantage. By and by a hoarse 
whistle was heard and a trail of smoke could be seen 
above the trees that hid a bend in the river. Then the 
churn of her paddle wheels could be heard by the eager 
listeners, and at last the boat herself appeared around 
the bend and drew near the dock. As Jim from his point 
of vantage looked down upon the deck of the approach- 
ing boat, he saw near a gangway an army cot upon 
which lay the doctor, his doctor, watched over by the 
faithful Koyano, who might have been saying to him- 
self, as the boat was being made fast, “As prearranged.” 

The men on the dock were on the point of cheering 
when Jim Joy stepped up on the gang plank bearing the 
doctor in his arms as if he were a little child, but some 
instinct checked them and they stood instead with bared 
heads until Jim laid his burden on a rude but comfort- 
able stretcher made of deer skins. Willing hands gently 
raised it and bore the doctor swiftly and smoothly up 


17 


the winding path to the cabin on the hill. Behind him 
marched a procession of men, bearing trunks and cases, 
which Koyano watched with zealous care. 

Poor Rodney said nothing. In fact, he was so ex- 
hausted by the long journey that he was only half con- 
scious of what was going on and felt as if he were in a 
half-waking dream. But he remembered afterwards that 
as Jim laid him gently on his balsam couch a hot tear 
splashed on his face. 

The next morning he was awakened by the subdued 
chatter of June birds and the fragrance of the woods 
came to him thru the open windows. For a long time 
he lay with closed eyes, at first simply listening and 
breathing, and then thinking. He had carried out his 
program and slipped out of the city world as quietly as 
if going on a summer vacation; he had fled from the 
wilderness of men to find a last resting place in a wilder- 
ness of trees. But was it to be a resting place? Not 
yet, his unquiet spirit told him. 

In thinking of the woods in the city, he had thot of 
their quiet; he had thot of being away from men, but 
that was not to be. There arose in the morning air the 
sound of choppers’ axes and the hum of the sawmill. 
Men shouted to each other and their teams, and he raised 
himself on his elbow, half expecting to see the men al- 
most under his own window. But no, a lumber gang was 
at work on a slope separated by a deep ravine from his 
own mountain side, and the sawmill was at the foot of the 
hill. Some years before he had bought a considerable 
tract of land about his camp to protect it from the ravages 
of the lumbermen and for a moment he was glad, but the 


18 


bitter thot quickly followed it, “What did it matter? 
What did anything matter?” 

As he watched the opposite slope, every now and then 
a great monarch of the forest would fall with a crash, 
“leaving a vacant place against the sky,” and he thot 
grimly to himself : “When they fall they are sawed up 
into lumber that is worth something. I am simply a 
rotten hulk.” 

Koyano’s quiet preparations for breakfast finally at- 
tracted his attention from his gloomy reflections. By 
some magic the place had already begun to have an 
ordered, he would not say a homelike, look. Boxes and 
cases had been deftly put out of the immediate fore- 
ground. Some warm-colored rugs were on the floor; a 
fire of white birch logs burned cheerfully in the wide, 
open fireplace, for even in June there is a tang of cold 
in the north woods. On the massive slab table a dainty 
white square was already set with familiar breakfast 
dishes and an armchair was drawn up beside it. He 
rubbed his eyes to be sure that he was quite awake. But 
Koyano’s look of pleased attention as he looked thru the 
door of the little lean-to which was used as a kitchen, 
assured him that he was not dreaming and a little 
trickle of warmth seemed to flow thru his heart. How 
much thot and labor, of the kind that no money can buy, 
that blessed Brownie must have expended for him while 
he brooded and gloomed over his own miseries ! 

Rodney had planned to stay in bed indefinitely, per- 
haps always. Now that he had crawled into his hole, 
why not lie there like a wounded animal? But that ex- 
pectant chair and waiting table appealed to a better self. 


19 


He heard Koyano at work in the kitchen and the aroma 
of coffee tickled his nostrils, and the sizzle of browning 
trout made a pleasantly familiar music. After all, why 
disappoint this ministering spirit, who evidently had no 
notion of letting him become bunk-ridden? 

On a big slab chair by his bedside was a basin of cool 
spring water with towel and soap, and within easy 
reach such clothes as he could put on without help. As 
Rodney made his slow toilet, he glanced anxiously about 
to make sure that not even Koyano was watching his un- 
accustomed labors. Koyano was apparently engrossed in 
his culinary duties, but just at the right time he slipped in 
and helped the doctor into his clothes so deftly that it was 
done before he knew it, and he found himself sitting down 
to such a breakfast as would have stirred the jaded appe- 
tite of a dyspeptic czar. Soon after breakfast, Jim Joy 
came in with two big bear dogs, Bouncer and Buster. Tho 
the cabin was a large one, they seemed to fill it to over- 
flowing. At first both men were a little constrained by 
the terrible thing about which they could not speak, but 
the constraint soon wore away. In response to his ques- 
tions, Jim Joy told Rodney of the swift change of a 
hunters’ camp to a lumber camp, of the cuts that had 
been made, and of the great log rafts which had been 
floated down the lake. He explained the workings of 
the log shute which stretched across the face of the oppo- 
site slope and down which large logs were shunted to the 
sawmill below. While in the midst of the gossip of the 
place, a whistle called Jim away to his duties as log meas- 
urer. No allusion had been made to Rodney’s disaster or 
the cause of it. In fact, it was characteristic of the two 


20 


men that the subject was never spoken of directly by 
either. 

Every morning before he went to his work and every 
evening Jim dropped in “to pass the time of day” with 
his doctor, and often beguiled him from his gloomy 
broodings by his quaint talk. Almost against his will, 
Rodney found himself increasingly interested in the life 
of the camp. He came to know the names of the 
men, some of whom would come in of an evening 
and sit on the porch of his cabin and after a gruff, 
“Howdy, ‘Doc/ ” smoke their pipes in a silence broken 
only occasionally by laconic comments about the weather, 
timber and the like. 

As the days and weeks slipped by, Rodney grew weary 
of his self-absorbed broodings. He tried to read, but 
his interest was fitful. He even tried to write, but he 
had always depended upon his environments so far and 
his pen lagged and stopped. 

Notwithstanding his affection for Jim and a certain 
interest in the life of the camp, Rodney seemed to his 
two solicitous watchers to be sinking into a kind of hope- 
less apathy. But it was Koyano, the man of craft and 
resources, who finally devised a plan to rouse the doctor 
to something of his old interest in life. 

Among the boxes which Koyano had packed were a 
number about which Rodney had given no directions. He 
had showed them to Jim early one morning before the 
doctor was up. There was a case of shining surgeons' 
tools and rolls of bandages and absorbent cotton; there 
was a box filled with bottles and boxes of all sizes, neatly 
labeled; there was a shelf full of formidable books. 


21 


One morning not long after, Jim Joy bolted into the 
cabin crying: “Doc, tell me what to do; Mike has been 
chewed up in the mill and that damned camp doctor is 
drunk; there ain't another within thirty miles. We done 
the best we could, but he’ll bleed to death sure if sum- 
thin’ more ain’t done. Can’t you tell us what to do?” 

The slumbering professional instinct in the doctor was 
suddenly aroused and he eagerly questioned Jim as to 
the nature of the hurt, but he soon saw that nothing 
could be done by unskilled hands and sank back into his 
chair. “It’s no use. If I could only go to him, but I’m 
as helpless as a babe.” 

Jim jumped to his feet, as if seized with a sudden in- 
spiration. “Doc, if you will be head and hands, I will be 
back and legs. Will you go?” “But I have no tools and 
bandages — nothing,” replied the doctor. “Will these 
do?” put in Koyano, and Rodney turned to see his old 
emergency case lying on the table beside him. 

In less time than it takes to tell it, Jim Joy had the 
doctor “pig-a-back,” as the boys say, and was dashing 
swiftly but surefootedly down the path to the camp, fol- 
lowed by Koyano. It was a strange sight, but no one 
who saw it smiled. 

Jim Joy hurriedly carried the doctor to the shanty 
where many of the lumbermen slept, to a cot at the further 
end where lay a man with livid and pain-distorted face, 
swathed in blood-soaked bandages. It was a terrible 
sight, and Rodney, weak and unnerved, suddenly felt that 
sinking of the heart and sense of nausea which had all 
but unmanned him when, as a student, he had first assisted 
in a difficult operation. But a glance at Jim’s face brot 


him to his senses. Jim’s back and legs had not failed 
him and neither his head nor his hands must fail Jim. 
His hands ceased trembling; the color came back to his 
face and to his eyes there came again the look of the 
cool-headed and determined fighter for life. Jim sup- 
ported him from behind and Koyano supplied, as if by 
intuition, the needed instrument or bandage. As they 
worked, a group of men watched with terrible earnest- 
ness, knowing that anyone of them might have been on 
that blood-stained cot. It was a weird sight. In the dim 
light of the background the men’s eyes had a half-savage 
look. One might have imagined them a group of primi- 
tive savages watching a human sacrifice. 

To the watchers the process seemed slow. A tourni- 
quet was applied here, a bandage there; at another place 
a swift motion setting a broken bone and then a simple 
but satisfactory splint was applied. At last it was done 
and the surgeon, white-lipped but steady-eyed, felt the 
man’s pulse and turning to the other men said, “He will 
pull thru.” Then he slipped down into Jim’s arms like 
a tired child in the arms of his mother and fainted. 

When Rodney came to full consciousness again he 
was lying in his own bunk in the cabin on the hill. The 
sounds of the morning were streaming in at the open 
window. At first he wondered if the experiences of the 
day before had not been dreams or the product of a 
diseased imagination, but no, on the table lay his surgi- 
cal instruments which Koyano was carefully cleaning 
and replacing in their case. His head ached with a dull 
grinding pain, but as he sank back on his balsam couch 
for another rest something of the old miserable heart- 


23 


ache seemed to have slipped away. He dropped into a 
quiet sleep with a new thot and purpose filling his 
soul. Crippled as he was, he had saved a human life. 
Perhaps in this far-off place, his professional training 
and skill might be of some use. Surely it was better to 
die fighting like a man than to crawl away like a sick 
animal. 

When Rodney awoke later in the day, he found Jim 
Joy sitting by his bedside. “Well, Doc, how be you? 
We done a good job yesterday, Mike’s goin’ to pull thru.” 
The doctor’s expression evidently encouraged him to go 
on with something that was on his mind. “The boss 
gave the old doctor the bounce this morning and he pulled 
out this afternoon. You can bet there wa’n’t no band 
music or flowers when the old soak skipped. We boys 
have been kinder puttin’ our heads together and we Ag- 
ger that a 'doc’ who’s got a head on him and whose hands 
are onto their job, tho his back and legs ain’t what they 
was, owing to his having been ketched, is a damned sight 
safer man in a lumber camp than a doc whose legs and 
head is likely to be all on ’em queered when he is wanted 
most. And we have been to see the boss and he says 
he’ll appint you camp doc if we’ll tote you ’round where 
you’re wanted. We agreed to that all right, you bet, and 
I says to the boys, 'All ’cepting his legs, he’s the best pill 
mixer and sawbones west of the Atlantic Ocean and east 
of the Pacific, and as for legs, why, dang it, he’s got mine, 
and they’ve got as much kick in them as any burro’s with- 
in sight of the Rockies.’ What do you say, Doc? It’s 
your play.” 

For a moment Rodney could not reply, but he reached 


24 


out his hand to the big-hearted giant with a pressure that 
meant more than words. At last he replied: “This is 
very different from anything that I had planned. I don’t 
know how much I can do or how long I can do it, but I 
will try it and see.” 

After Jim had gone, Rodney began planning for his 
new work with a zest which he had supposed forever 
gone from his life. Work! He could still work, even 
tho it were a little and in a far-off corner. He could go 
to sleep with a consciousness of having done something. 
He could awake to the knowledge that there was some- 
thing waiting for him to do. If work be a curse, what 
must God’s blessings be! 

Rodney realized on thinking it over that good as Jim’s 
legs were he could not entirely depend upon them, and 
set about planning a means of getting about better suited 
to his needs and the peculiar character of the country. 
When Jim came in the next day he said to him, “Jim, 
your legs are good, but I want more of them. I shall 
want eight at least in addition to yours.” Jim looked at 
him with wide-eyed amazement and something of puzzled 
hurt and Rodney hastened to explain. “I want two sure- 
footed burros and I want you and the boys to rig up 
a kind of sling with two long poles between which the 
burros can go as if they were in shafts — perhaps I can 
drive them myself after a while and I will have the swell- 
est doctor’s turnout in town.” 

Jim eagerly grasped the idea. Within a few days a 
pair of burros, used to the hills and rough trails, had been 
bought and the boys had rigged up a kind of palanquin 
which was light, strong and comfortable for the crippled 


25 


man. Jim broke in the strange team, which was naturally 
puzzled at the queer thing swung between them. Rodney 
laughed until he cried when he watched them. Many a 
time Jim was tossed out and it took the combined camp 
“to sort out the outfit again,” as the men said with glee. 

It was a proud day for Jim as he drove up to the 
cabin “in Doc’s kerrige,” his long legs almost trailing on 
the ground. 

Soon a rough log stable was built back of the cabin and 
the burros introduced into their new home. After a few 
experiments Rodney was able to drive himself, tho Ko- 
yano always attended him and sometimes led the burros 
over rough places. 

As summer slipped into fall Rodney’s practice grew. 
When it was learned that there was a real city doctor 
at the camp, calls came from neighboring camps and 
from the scattered cabins of trappers and pioneer settlers. 
The news spread rapidly and sometimes Rodney drove 
his little burros twenty miles a day when visiting far-off 
patients. 

The outdoor life bronzed his face and hands ; he slept 
profoundly and ate with new relish, but his limbs showed 
no response to his new vigor. He had not expected that. 

And Margaret? At first he day-dreamed about her, 
but he soon found that that would not do. He tried to 
forget her in his work, but that was impossible. Had 
she forgotten him? Was she happy? Would she be glad 
to know that he was useful — yes, beloved, as he could see 
in the eyes of his woodland patients? Sometimes these 
questions seemed to keep time to the footsteps of his 
burros or the beating of his heart. But no answer came 


26 


and his two watchful lovers, Jim and Koyano, were 
troubled by the wistful, hungry look that rarely left his 
face, except in some emergency of his profession. 

Koyano pondered ; evidently the heart of the white man 
was like that of the brown man. Work was not enough. 
One night after Rodney was asleep, he went to a small 
box in which he kept his most treasured belongings and 
took from it an envelope filled with the torn fragments of 
a letter. With Oriental patience he tried to piece them 
together like the parts of a puzzle map, but he could not 
do it. A happy thot came to him. He took a slip of 
paper and wrote on it in the round hand of a schoolboy : 

Esteemed and most honored lady: 

I find this. I think it belonged to you, therefore I 
send it. His head works; his heart weeps. 

Koyano. 

He put the slip with the fragments of the letter into 
an envelope and addressed it with painstaking care to 
Margaret Maybourne. The next day he gave it to Jim 
with solemn injunctions not to lose it and to see that it 
was safely put in the mail bag. Jim said afterward that 
if he had had a hundred thousand dollars in cash in his 
pockets and had been on the worst street in Winnipeg at 
midnight he would not have felt more anxious. But the 
letter was duly mailed and for a time we must leave it to 
the tender mercies of the leather pouch. 


27 


Part III. 


Fall gradually yielded to winter. The deceptive 
warmth of Indian summer vanished in a night. Jack 
Frost cracked his whip. Snow fell quietly but steadily 
and covered wood and clearing with blankets of white. 
The last boat had gone down the lake. The only means 
of communication with the outside world would now be 
snowshoes and sledges. For a month at least no word 
would come from the outer world. With suppressed 
eagerness Koyano had waited for the last mail, but no 
letter came. “After all, were the hearts of the white 
women like those of the brown, in far-off Nippon?’' He 
was troubled as he questioned. 

That winter something happened which the men of 
the north woods tell of even now. 

During the winter months the lumber camp was a busy 
place. The logs which were sent down the great shute 
were drawn to the sawmill or to the river to be floated 
down by the spring freshet. After each log had fallen 
into the sawdust at the bottom of the shute, a gang of 
men with their teams dragged it out of the way and a 
wire signal cable gave notice at the top that the road was 
clear for another. Rodney never tired of watching the 
rush of the logs down the shute and their plunge into 
the great pile of buffer sawdust. 

One afternoon Rodney sat in his easy chair by the 
window, watching the rush of the great logs down the 

28 


icy shute. This afternoon he was all alone. It was not 
time for Jim’s afternoon visit and Koyano had gone to 
the village on an errand. This afternoon it was more 
than usually exciting. A gang of men were trying to break 
the record for the number of logs moved, and in order 
to cut short the “wait,” the man who gave the signal 
would give it just a little before the last one had been 
gotten out of the way. Log followed log with dangerous 
rapidity. Several times it seemed to the fascinated 
watcher as if one had plunged into the group of eager 
workers. “By Jove,” said Rodney to himself, “just one 
little slip and there’s a hurry call for the doctor.” The 
words had scarcely left his lips when the slip came. 
Either the signal man took too large a chance or a branch 
from a log pulled the signal wire. No one knows. With 
horror Rodney saw a great sixty-foot log rush down the 
shute and plunge into the group of workmen and then 
ricochetting on the log which had preceded it, hurl itself 
like a Titanic battering-ram into the sawmill, full of 
workers at this time of day. 

A terrified shout reached him even thru the closed 
window. It had happened and only quick work would 
save some of the wounded men, but he was alone. In 
a frenzy of eagerness he raised himself from his chair 
by the strength of his arms and tried to stand, only to 
fall to the floor with a groan. But he did not lie there. 
He dragged himself to the table where his emergency 
case lay, and pulling it down pushed it before him as 
he dragged himself painfully to the door. He had some 
half-formed purpose of rolling and sliding down the path 
to the foot of the hill. It seemed to him hours before 


he reached the door and pulled himself out upon the 
snow. There, within easy reach, as if put there by some 
fore-thinking Providence, was the sledge which was used 
in winter months to bring supplies from the village. 
Only the day before Jim, in response to a dare from 
some of the men, had slid down the hill with many a 
perilous twist and lurch, finally taking a “header” in a 
great bank of snow at the bottom. 

If Rodney had taken time to calculate, he would have 
known that the chance for his doing successfully what 
the powerful lumberman with his great bodily strength 
and experience had found so hard and difficult, was 
scarcely one in a thousand, but he did not. He dragged 
himself painfully on the sledge and worked it to the edge 
of the decline, clawing the snow with his bare hands like 
a turtle in the sand. 

At last the sled began to move of itself and Rodney 
grasped the steering levers which acted as back stops 
when the sledge was being drawn up hill. For a few 
rods the sled ran smoothly and slowly, then it dashed 
down the hill like a snowslide in the Rockies. Rodney 
was never able to tell the story of that mad ride. It 
seemed as if some other hands must have steered the 
wild thing on which he rode. The few who saw it said 
that a flurry of snow seemed to shoot down the mountain 
side with something dark showing now and then at the 
heart of it. 

Loving hands and swift dug the doctor and his case 
out of the great drift which had swallowed them and 
bore him swiftly to the mill which looked like a shambles. 

The man who most needed his attention was Jim, who 


30 


was bleeding to death from a great cut in the leg. Five 
minutes more and he would have been gone beyond 
recall, but the surgeon's skilful hands quickly found the 
severed artery and stopped the ebbing tide of life. 

Tho many were desperately hurt, thanks to the doc- 
tor's skill, not a life was lost. It is true that some of the 
men had scars and limps and stiffnesses, but they seemed 
to look on them as badges of honor. They would say 
with pride to strangers, “Yes, I got it at the time of the 
big smash, when ‘Doc' beat the banshee." And it did 
not take much encouragement to draw out the rest of 
the story. 

Under Rodney's direction a big shack was turned into 
a temporary hospital and Koyano was installed as head 
nurse. For over two weeks the doctor stayed and did not 
go back to the camp on the hill. 

Jim was one of the slowest to recover. For days he 
lay in a kind of stupor. For some time he seemed too 
weak to talk, but watched the doctor as he was carried 
from cot to cot with an expression in his deep-set eyes 
more eloquent than words. 

One day as Rodney sat by his side, Jim spoke in a 
husky, far-away voice, so unlike his old ringing tone that 
it startled Rodney. “Doc, I did not think it would ever 
be me lyin’ on the bunk and some other feller totin' 
yer around, but say, if yer hadn't come when yer did, 
it would have been all up with Jim Joy, and I have been 
thinkin' as how I wan't quite ready to go — hadn't as 
many credit checks as I'd orter had. The fellows has 
been sayin' that yer saved my life and yer did, Doc, yer 
did in a way, but I've been figgerin' that if it had not 


31 


been for Someone whom I hain't thot of as much as I'd 
orter, yer wouldn't ha' been here, and as for steerin' 
that sled and keepin' on top of her all the way down 
alone — Say, Doc, yer couldn’t ha' dun it, kud yer?" 

Rodney could only shake his head and say, “Jim, I 
guess you're on the right trail, but" — and the thot of his 
useless limbs and the lost Margaret checked him, “I can't 
follow you very far yet." 

That night Koyano, as he noiselessly made his rounds, 
heard this strange prayer from Jim's bunk: “God, I ain't 
much used to speakin’ to yer and it kind 'a scares me to 
think of yer bein' so near as to have any hand in what 
goes on in this camp, bein' as I ain't used to the idee. I 
don't want nuthin’ for myself, 'ceptin' a chanct to git out 
some big timber for yer if yer want it — but if yer could 
spare time to help Doc a little, there ain’t nothin’ I 
wouldn’t do for yer. I 'spect he hain't thot much of yer, 
same as me ; but, God, he's the squarest, straightest man 
that ever walked on two legs — only he can't walk on his 
no more. Mebbe if yer was to let up on him a little, he 
would learn to see yer quicker — tho’ yer know better 
than me — but it hurts more than that damned — I mean 
that goldarned leg of mine to see him with that look in 
his eyes. And, God A'mity, I don't know much about 
girls, but if you could kind 'a say a word to that girl in 
New York, and tell her that Doc is eatin' out his heart 
for her and that he is worth more to any woman of sense 
than any other man she knows, even tho' he has got as 
many legs as a centipede, yer’ll greatly oblige, 

“Yours truly, 

“Jim Joy.” 


It was the next day — I was interested to get the date 
from one who knew — that Margaret received a long- 
delayed letter. She was at the Metropolitan Opera 
House again, sitting in a box with her father and a 
young man who was trying with indifferent success to 
draw her attention to himself and his small talk. She 
was thinking of the evening, less than a year ago, when 
she had sat in the same place with Rodney at her side. 
His face, with its lines of power, the tender look in his 
eyes and the lips that seemed ready to speak, were more 
clear to her than they had ever been since the time of 
their parting. Why had he left her in silence? Where 
had he gone? Why had he gone? Why did no one 
know where he was? 

She was startled from her musing by her father's lean- 
ing over her and throwing a letter into her lap. “It came 
this afternoon, but I forgot it. What backwoodsman 
are you corresponding with ?” She looked quickly at the 
queer looking letter. It was very much the worse for 
wear. It looked as tho it had been soaked and then dried 
before the fire, but the direction was still clear and with 
difficulty she could make out the postmark. She opened 
it with idle curiosity, her mind still full of Rodney. 

As she did so, a torn slip of paper fell into her lap and 
her eyes caught three blurred words that startled her 
from her dream, “My dear Margaret." With trembling 
fingers she slipped it back into the envelope which she 
put into her muff and clutched with tense fingers as a 
drowning man grasps a life rope. Margaret could never 
remember how she lived thru the next hour, and how she 
reached the seclusion of her own room. Once there, she 


33 


bolted her door and with shaking hands emptied the piti- 
ful scraps on her table. With beating heart she read 
Koyano’s letter, and with eyes dimmed by tears she put 
together the torn pieces of her lover’s letter. It was 
nearly morning before the last fragment was in its place, 
and then with great choking sobs, Margaret knelt before 
the table and laid her face upon as pathetic a love letter 
as ever woman received. 

The next morning with reverent care she pasted each 
tiny scrap into its right place on a fresh sheet of paper 
and took it to her father. She buried her face in his 
shoulder, as she had done when a little child, while he 
read it. The old man did so with difficulty, every now 
and then stopping to wipe his glasses and breathing 
heavily. Then he turned and drew Margaret to him with 
a tenderness that no one who saw him upon the street 
would have dreamed him capable of. Since she had lost 
her mother, David Maybourne had been both father and 
mother to her. 

That afternoon David Maybourne went to see Doctor 
Colrain. “Doctor, do you know where Rodney Levas- 
seur is?” “No, I do not,” replied the doctor, “and I 
feel more than half ashamed that I do not, but he evi- 
dently wanted to get away, even from the sympathy of 
his friends, and I have respected his wish.” 

“Do you know what is the matter with him? Believe 
me, it is not idle curiosity which prompts the question.” 

The doctor looked at him in silence for a moment and 
then replied grimly, as if to hide emotion which profes- 
sional etiquette would not allow him to show, “Paralysis 
of lower back and limbs — overwork.” 


34 


“Any hope?” 

“No.” 

Without comment the old man drew his hand to his 
eyes and walked heavily out of the office door. “Why 
did such things happen? Why had Margaret loved a 
man, who — was going to have such a thing happen to 
him?” he unreasoned with himself. “Why was Mar- 
garet, like her mother, one of those who could not for- 
get?” He groaned aloud, oblivious of those about him, 
and some who heard him thot that he had lost money on 
the street, not knowing that the old man could have lost 
a million without changing face. 

He went home and shut himself in his room and faced 
the facts, as had been his lifelong custom. It was not 
a question of what he wanted, but of what could be done 
under the circumstances. As he mused, first pity and 
then a more kindly feeling stole into his heart. He had 
been a game fighter, this young doctor, and when he lost 
there was no whimpering. He had done just what he 
himself would have done in his place. Moved by sudden 
impulse, he rose and stood before the picture of Mar- 
garet's mother and looked at it with pathetic questioning. 
“What would she have done?” 

Some answer seemed to come to his questioning, for 
he turned and went with his usual decision of manner to 
his desk and wrote the following letter. 

My dear Rodney: 

It was only yesterday that Margaret and I learned why you 
had left us so suddenly and where you had gone. I cannot 
express my sympathy for your misfortune, but I can express, 
my appreciation of the motive which led you to slip away as 
you did. It was manly and like you, but, my dear Rodney, it 

35 


was too late to run away. Margaret and I would rather share 
your trouble here, where perhaps we could make it less, than in 
Canada where we cannot, and where distance and uncertainty 
add to our anxiety. Come back. If you are willing I will come 
for you. 

Faithfully yours, 

David Maybourne. 

Then he called Margaret and drawing her down beside 
him showed her the letter which he had written. For a 
moment she forgot her lover to wonder at the self-deny- 
ing love of her father. Only she could know how much 
self-denial that letter meant. She turned to speak to 
him, but his eyes had that far-off look which even as a 
child she had learned to interpret. Kissing his gray hair 
reverently she took a pen and added one word of post- 
script, “Come!” 

Part IV. 

In the early spring Rodney sat in the door of his cabin 
and watched the coming of the mail boat. During the 
year of his exile it had never brot him anything but 
supplies and business letters. Still he could never see it 
come without a quickening of the pulse, and after the 
mail had been distributed and no personal message came 
to him, an unreasonable depression of spirits would 
seize him. 

Perhaps it was the spring songs which moved him; 
perhaps it was the long waiting, but this time as the boat 
drew near he could feel the pounding and throbbing of 
his heart. He tried to control it by directing his thot to 
other things, but it was a useless attempt. He found 
himself listening almost breathlessly for Koyano’s foot- 
steps. “What made him so late?” He glanced angrily at 


36 


his watch only to find that Koyano could not have 
returned by this time by any possible hurrying, and “why 
should he hurry ?” 

But at last Koyano came and laid two businesslike 
letters on the table with manifest indifference. Rodney, 
with a sense of disappointment which angered him, 
turned and ripped open the first letter and after a glance 
tossed it into the waste basket. In the same way he 
opened the second letter but Koyano noticed a sudden 
change in his doctor’s face ; he turned white and tense and 
the hand which grasped the open letter trembled. Rodney 
read the letter thru again and again, seeming unable to 
grasp its meaning, but at last it came to him. His first 
conscious thought was of the father. “I did not suppose 
that a man could do it ; it does not seem credible.'” Then 
his heart leaped to the appeal of that short but eloquent 
postscript and the blood surged back into his face. It 
seemed as if his soul would rend his body in its struggle 
to answer Margaret’s call. 

Poor Koyano! Women are not the only ones who 
have to wait in silence and uncertainty. The charm was 
working, but how ? 

I could not, if I would, describe Rodney’s struggles 
that night. If he could only see Margaret; if he could 
hear her voice and feel the touch of her fingers ; if — and 
all thot was lost in a riot of feeling. But from the begin- 
ning, in the background of his consciousness, waiting for 
the tumult to subside, stood his better and stronger self 
and he could give but one decision. 

The next morning Rodney wrote so that the letter 
could be carried by the returning boat. 


37 


My dear Mr. Maybourne: 

I do not know how you found my retreat. I thot I had 
covered my tracks, but I am glad that I did not succeed. If I 
had, I should never have known to what unselfish heights love 
could carry a father. If God is a Father and a father can do 
a thing like this, I shall have to think more of Him than I have. 

But I cannot come. In New York I would simply be a help- 
less cripple, ignored by most, cared for tenderly by a few, but 
useless. Here I can do what no one else can do, or at least is 
willing to do. And I know it is a poor thot, but I cannot help 
it. Here I am not hurt by pity. The men are used to me. 

And — you know what I once longed for. Knowing Mar- 
garet, you know that my feeling for her could not change. But 
being a man and the man you are, God bless you, you know that 
I could not come unless it was to her heart and home, and how 
could I, half man that I am, do that? I would not even be that 
if I let her sacrifice herself to pity. 

No, I cannot, must not, will not, come. 

I must stay with my few sheep in the wilderness. But believe 
me, when this pain has passed, I shall be happier than I ever thot 
to be. And Margaret, tell her to forget — no, not that — tell her 
to think of me as one who has passed on and cannot return, but 
awaits — but no, you must not tell her that, for she must be as 
free as God’s air and sunshine. 

Gratefully yours, 

Rodney Levasseur. 

After that, Jim noticed a change in the doctor. The 
look of restlessness and bitterness had gone and a look 
not often seen upon a man’s face, tho more often on a 
woman’s, had taken its place — that of one who has passed 
thru great tribulation and found the other shore. I think 
it was this that the seer John had in mind when he said, 
“He hath put His mark in their foreheads.” God had 
put His mark upon him, and while he knew it not, even 
the rough men of the lumber camp saw it and wondered. 


38 


Rodney had found, as Carlyle saw, but did not experi- 
ence, “That a man may miss of happiness and gain 
instead thereof blessedness.” 

Up to this time, Rodney had been satisfied to dress 
wounds and prescribe for disease of the body, but his 
eyes now began to see that these men had deeper hurts 
than any given by saw or axe or falling timber, and that 
the sickness of a soul is infinitely worse than the sickness 
of the body. As he went about his rounds he became a 
ministering spirit, tho he knew it not. Now it was a brok- 
en prayer at the bedside of the dying, now a verse of 
Scripture at some humble grave to which no minister 
could come, and then it was a grasp of the hand that had 
moral lift in it for some poor fellow who had fallen. 
And the boys of the camp, who had generally run wild 
when not at work found that the doctor knew no end of 
wonderful things, that he could tell stories that were 
more fun than hanging about the groggery, and which 
made one feel, as one of the boys said, “As if it might be 
jolly good fun to be somebody.” 

Thru these weeks of self-forgetful service, God came 
to him in thot of Margaret. 

That winter Jim and the doctor put their heads 
together. Drink is the curse of the frontier camp as well 
as of the city. Many camps are too remote for the gos- 
pel to reach them, but not for gin. And the men hav- 
ing nothing to do of an evening visit the saloon which 
furnishes them with the liquor which men without pur- 
pose crave. In this camp the saloon was a wing of the 
store and postoffice, and every night, winter and summer, 
it was the rounding up place for most of the men. 


It was Jim’s idea to begin with, but Rodney worked 
out the details. “Doc,” said Jim, musingly, “Doc, I wish 
there was some place in this camp where the boys could 
git together of an evenin’ besides that danged rum hole. 
They ain’t natchally bad, most uv ’em, but the liccer plays 
hell with ’em.” 

That set Rodney to thinking. He had been hoping for 
some time to get the lumber boss to put up a big shack 
which could be used as an emergency hospital. Why 
not make the plan and the building larger? He went 
to the boss and much to that man’s surprise, persuaded 
him to put up a building with four rooms, one for a hos- 
pital, one for a reading and game room and two small 
rooms for Koyano and himself, for he knew that he must 
stand by this new venture if it was to succeed. 

After the building was done he left the cabin on the 
hill, half regretfully and half gladly, and took up his 
work in what the men came to know as “Doc’s place,” 
tho it might just as properly have been called Jim’s, for 
it never would have gone without him. Later the letters 
Y. M. C. A. were placed over the door, but to the men 
it was still “Doc’s.” 

As soon as Rodney had moved in, Jim came to him 
and said: “Now as to startin’ this log down the shute, 
my idee is this. Mebbe I understand the ways of the 
boys a little better than you do, bein’, as it were, one of 
’em ; my idee is that we don’t want no free lunch business 
here. If the boys think it is their show, it will go a 
hummin’, but if they think it’s set up, you can’t move it 
with the best team of mules in this camp. Yer get the 
boss to give the room for a small rent and I’ll start a 


40 


club. A pool club will do as well as any other — and the 
readin’ and sich like things can drift in kinder natchal 
like/’ 

Jim was a genius. The boys “caught on” with enthusi- 
asm and chipped in enough to buy a couple of old pool 
tables. Little by little other games were added. News- 
papers and magazines made their appearance. One by 
one the old retainers of the saloon dropped in, at first 
occasionally, and then regularly. Rodney could never 
tell just how it was done, except that it was “Jim’s 
work.” The same qualities which had made him the 
ruling spirit of the grocery and grog shop made him the 
leader now. Wherever he was, there was good company. 
The men seemed to enjoy nothing better than sitting 
before the great open fireplace, smoking their pipes, and 
listening to or sharing in the conversation which Jim con- 
trolled without conscious effort. Almost every mail brot 
something to add to the attractions of Doc’s place. At 
one time it was a box of books, at another a phonograph, 
and so on. 

Rodney vaguely wondered where they all came from 
and how the men could afford them, but his mind was 
so absorbed with fitting up his little hospital that he was 
not so observing as he otherwise would have been. 
When he asked Jim any questions, they were always met 
in a way that satisfied him at the time without leaving 
a clear impression on his mind. 

One more observant would have noticed that Jim and 
Koyano had a secret, which tickled Jim so much that “he 
felt like to bust.” 

The secret began two weeks after Rodney’s letter to 


41 


David Maybourne, when this letter came to Koyano, 
written in a dainty woman’s hand, but which Koyano 
could read only with Jim’s help. 

My dear Mr. Koyano : 

Thank you for sending me the letter. It was mine and I owe 
you more than I can tell for sending it. I hope it will make a 
great difference in all our lives some time, and when it does 
we will remember what we owe to your love and fidelity. 

In the meanwhile, I want you to do something for me, but I 
don’t want anyone to know about it. Will you send me a letter 
by every mail and tell me whether the doctor is well and what 
he is doing — and if he looks happy and if he needs anything? 

And sometime — you must not even look as if you knew — I will 
come and see you. 

Affectionately your friend, 

Margaret Maybourne. 

P. S. If he should be sick, you must let me know at once. 

Every mail after that carried a quaintly worded bulle- 
tin from Koyano, which, tho short, was so long in mean- 
ing to Margaret that she soon got a very clear idea of the 
life her lover was living. At first her heart was torn 
by the thot of his weakness in the wilderness, then it 
swelled with pride in his courage and in the work which 
he was doing with such quiet bravery. 

By the end of the winter the hospital had been equipped 
to suit Rodney’s desire. Jim had made out of “Doc’s 
place” an attractive social center. It was slowly but 
surely putting the saloon out of business, and the boss 
admitted that he could have afforded to pay all the bills 
himself, the men were so much more efficient. Rodney 
was busy with his work which he loved ; he was honored 


42 


and believed in, and all thru the fall and winter had been 
absorbed by his new plans and upheld by a new sense 
of the Fatherhood of God. But spring brot a change. 
The sense of exaltation passed and the exhilaration of 
his work ceased. Following Jim's suggestion, he went 
back to his cabin on the hill. 

Rodney still went about his duties as usual in his 
strange burro-carriage, but when his work was over he 
would sit for hours on the porch and look wistfully 
down the river with eyes that seemed to look farther 
still. 

One night as Koyano stepped up behind him, bring- 
ing a book for which the doctor had asked, but about 
which he had forgotten, he heard him murmuring, ‘'Mar- 
garet, Margaret! O God, I need Margaret!" 

Without giving him the book, Koyano stole away and 
the next mail carried a brief but eloquent note to 
Margaret. 

It was not quite a month later, near the last of June, 
that Rodney happened to reach the village returning 
from one of his trips, about the time that the boat was 
due. He had never been there at its arrival since he 
himself had come, dreading this link with the outside 
world with a feeling natural, but more or less morbid 
as he knew. Today he decided to stay and watch the 
boat come in, “As a bit of moral discipline," he told 
himself. 

Everyone was familiar with the strange equipage, but 
they wondered a little to see it there. Every man, 
woman and child had a word for the doctor, but he did 
not notice it. No one, however, resented his silent ab- 


43 


straction. “I reckon it makes him kind uv homesick,” 
was the only comment. 

A couple of children, more daring than the rest, 
scrambled on the backs of the patient burros to get a 
better view. Tho they jostled Rodney as they did so, he 
did not notice them. His eyes were fixed steadily but 
apparently unseeingly upon the approaching boat. 

With its usual wheezy deliberation, it came up to the 
dock, was made fast, and the gang plank drawn out. So 
far, all was as usual, but the group of watchers suddenly 
sensed something new. The freight rustlers instead of 
rushing noisily up the plank, hung back, and a young 
woman followed by two middle-aged gentlemen mounted 
to the dock. 

Rodney watched them in a kind of stupor as they 
passed thru the group of watchers and came towards 
him, but when they were within a few feet of him, a 
“light that never was on sea or land” suddenly illu- 
mined his face with heaven's own glory. Those who 
were near him heard him speak only two words, “Mar- 
garet, Margaret,” in tones that brot tears to the eyes of 
the rough woodsmen, and then, galvanized into new life 
by the most subtle and most potent energy in the world, 
the doctor slipped down from his sling seat and stood 
trembling before her. 

It was Doctor Colrain’s cheery voice which broke the 
tension, too great to be borne for very long. “Rodney, 
my boy, the miracle has been wrought by this dear won- 
der worker, to the confusion of our medical science, but 
go it slow. Here, boys, help the doctor into his chariot !” 

As for David Maybourne, he cleared his throat, and 


44 


blew his nose as if it had been midwinter, not noticing 
that Rodney did not speak to him till they were well on 
their way up the hill. 

Margaret insisted upon walking beside Rodney all the 
way, saying little, but gently petting the burros as she 
walked beside them, in a way that spoke volumes. Had 
they not carried him? 

When they reached the cabin, Koyano was there to 
greet them, with such a glow in his face as did honor 
to the Sunrise Kingdom. He looked keenly at Margaret 
and was content. Even a maiden of the Samurai could 
not have done better. 

The delicate aroma of rare Japanese tea filled the air, 
and the table was set on the porch at the spot overlooking 
the river, but Rodney at least never looked that way. 

Just as they were about to sit down, Rodney said, with 
a tremble in his voice, “This will not be complete without 
Jim Joy.” 

As if answering to his wish, Jim entered, and it was 
Jim and Margaret who helped Rodney to his seat. Then 
it was Jim who took the laboring oar in the conversation 
and left the others, less embarrassed, to their thots. 

Doctor Colrain and David Maybourne soon slipped 
away to look about them and talk of lumber and rail- 
roads, and other things about which they were not think- 
ing. Koyano busied himself ostentatiously in his kitchen. 
Jim rose to go, and as he stood before them said rever- 
ently, “God’s a heap better than we thot, ain’t He?” 

Just as the sun was setting and its glory was on them 
both, Rodney turned to Margaret with a sudden look of 
trouble in his face : “Margaret, forgive me, but I cannot 


45 


go back, even with you. They need me here.” And the 
shadow of a great fear quenched the light in his face. 
But Margaret leaned towards him with a look in her face 
that he had never seen before and said: ‘‘Rodney, I do 
not ask you to leave your work, your noble work, I only 
want you to let me share it with you,” and then with an 
archness, sweet to him as the breath of the balsam, “You 
know that when the mountain would not come to 
Mohammed, Mohammed had to go to the mountain, so 
I have come to you, my blessed mountain.” 

The summer twilight yielded to the glory of a star- 
decked and moon-illumined night, and the two were 
alone, in the mountain, before God. 

(Finis) 


46 


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